Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2018 March 3

= March 3 =

YouTube views . ..
I often watch youtube. All of the vids will list how many "views" but, I am wondering what constitutes a "view." There are many times I watch the first 10-20 seconds of a vid but stop because I think it is stupid, misleading (title) or just boring. Does just opening the vid constitute a "view" (which can be misleading . . . a million people can open the vid, but, in my mind, if only ten thousand actually watch it, claiming a million views is misleading)? 76.71.157.121 (talk) 20:51, 3 March 2018 (UTC)
 * Looking at their support pages, How YouTube video views are counted. Aparently, they are using some algorithm or procedure to validate whether a video is actually watched by a human instead of a machine. That does not really directly answers your question, so I did some more digging: I found this article from 2015 that says that YouTube counts a view after the video is watched for "around 30 seconds". But then this one from 2017 says that YouTube now does not want to release its specific criteria because it could be gamed by others to pad their view counts. So based on those links, my guess would be that only viewing a video for 10-20 seconds would NOT be counted to prevent either a human or machine from easily padding those statistics. Zzyzx11 (talk) 21:23, 3 March 2018 (UTC)